MB#4 - What’s the First Order of Business in Your Next Strategic Planning Retreat?

Do You Start by Looking Forward? Or Behind?

There’s a debate among planners: should the first exercise in your strategy retreat (or workshop or meeting) be based on the past or the future? Some cast it as a choice between a negative and a positive, but is it really that simple?

What’s at stake as you decide? If getting off to a strong start is important, then the quality of your retreat may rely on the first few hours. In this article, we’ll see why the counter-intuitive choice to begin with the past matters so much.

A Story of a Lost Vision

I waited for my meeting in the lobby of my new client. Nervous, and with nothing to do, I started reading the plaques on the walls. 

Hanging in a place of prominence, the company’s vision statement could not be missed. Neither could its message, which announced its role as a “proud monopoly provider of telecom services.”

But this was a fiction. The local telecommunications market had been open to competition for a couple of years, following global trends.

Obviously, at some point in the past, the company had tried to “envision” itself as the only game in town. But they had not updated their vision or never found time to remove the sign.

Either explanation was possible, but neither one provided me any comfort. Why? Since competition was introduced, the firm’s mobile market share had dropped from 100 to 40-something percent. Presumably, some folks upstairs cared about this disastrous result. And were now losing their minds. Certainly the top leaders back at headquarters overseas were now paying attention.

But did they see a connection between their old monopoly vision statement and the subsequent rise of other companies at their expense? Or did they see it as a matter of bad luck?

More to the point: what happened in their local, annual strategic planning retreats that allowed this calamity to occur?

Why Status-Quo Retreats Fail

As we look back at their drop in market share, let’s pretend we were a fly on the wall, listening in to their strategic planning meetings a year or two before everything changed. Maybe just above us hung the monopoly vision statement. It would have been framed and sent by the folks in headquarters.

Perhaps the job given to attendees in the meeting was simple. Just follow the company-as-sole-provider vision. Maybe they even read the words at the start, before they tackled the new targets handed down from above.

And chances are, the session was not about strategy at all…just tactics. They were probably told to use templates, then submit them up the line for approval. Headquarters needed to know they were focused on meeting their numbers, and undistracted by anything else.

Certainly, the idea was not to encourage awkward questions. For example, “What’s going to happen once competition enters the market?” was not a speculation to indulge in. There probably were a few people who whispered their concerns behind closed doors, and a foolhardy one or two who raised their voices publicly.

Perhaps when the government announced its change in policy to allow competitors, their worries increased. But profits were still being made, and there was always the chance that customers would ignore new, untrusted entrants.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that this point of view held true even after the monopoly ended. It took a while for the firm to accept that the dip in market share was real. And not temporary.

But inevitably, the company suffered real losses. Jobs were lost by the thousands. The market share never recovered.

Obviously, in retrospect, people wish things had gone differently. Perhaps, they wonder, the retreats should have been used to do more than figure out how to meet targets set from overseas. Maybe they should have been strategic.

After all, this was no hurricane or earthquake…an impetuous act of God. This particular disaster was slow-moving and took years to unfold. There were tens of opportunities to question the status quo.

If we accept that something should have been done differently, what role should that monopoly vision statement have played?